It’s just really difficult to admit that a trait we esteem, intelligence, can be possessed by a man who is so vile, and who eschews the trappings of education such as reading, writing, complex sentences, intellectual curiosity, and respect for the education and expertise of others.
I certainly believe that he is a narcissist. That and privilege and cunning have allowed him success, or at least to fail upwards, but I do think it has to be more than low cunning.
I’ve met a lot of people who would rather manipulate others than work, but they work hard at building the skills to manipulate and scam. Sometimes I think they work harder at avoiding work than they would if they just sat down and did what they ought to. I think Trump is in this category: not inherently stupid, but certainly privileged and lazy and inclined to spend his efforts manipulating others.
I do think he’s let his intellectual skills atrophy, relying on what has served him well thus far. Whatever he might have been intellectually, he’s less than that now, and not likely to improve.
One of Trump’s superpowers is that he has no shame about lying. When he’s caught, he just brushes it off with another lie and moves on. Normal people get anxious and display guilty nervousness and often try to apologize when confronted with their deceptions, because they have functioning emotions including a conscience. Trump does not. He will never feel bad about lying because he doesn’t have normal human feelings.
It’s a lot easier to avoid work when you’re rich. If you or I had to manipulate someone into doing our bidding, we’d need to be smart. Figure out exactly what to say to motivate them, find out what they really want, and convince them we can get it for them, talk a good game. But Trump? He can just buy people off, and there’s an endless supply of such people in our society. When one person finally realizes Trump is using them, or has no intention to pay up, there’s another one waiting in the wings to take their place.
It sounds like you’re saying he may have been born with relatively normal native intelligence as an infant, but spent his entire life acting like a dumbass and eventually actually became one. If so, I see no difference between that and a natural-born imbecile.
But I still stand by my original opinion that he’s genuinely stupid, and the most telling examples are his inability to speak or write coherently, his complete lack of natural curiosity, and the glaring evidence of Dunning-Kruger syndrome where he proposes the most appallingly stupid ideas and casts himself as a “stable genius” for doing so. I don’t buy the idea that the narcissistic quest for adulation that enables him to emotionally connect with imbeciles like himself is indicative of any kind of intelligence. Intelligent people are not constantly mocked in the media and laughed at when speaking to the UN General Assembly.
ETA: Stolen from another thread, but an interesting read in the present context:
"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas…
The media will not show the magnitude of this crowd. Even I, when I turned on today, I looked, and I saw thousands of people here, but you don’t see hundreds of thousands of people behind you because they don’t want to show that. We have hundreds of thousands of people here, and I just want them to be recognized by the fake news media. Turn your cameras please and show what’s really happening out here because these people are not going to take it any longer.
I’ve long been of the opinion that if Trump would have done these things, he would have been comfortably re-elected. This was his one opportunity to unite the country against a common ‘enemy’, but he chose the opposite route. Once he saw how the rubes reacted to school closures, mask mandates, and other measures, he jumped at the chance to further divide us.
Actually, he did endorse vaccines. After all, his administration put them on fast track development and he wanted to take credit for that. (In fact it was easily the best thing his admin did.) But on at least two occasions, when he brought up vaccination during one of his rallies, he got loudly booed for it. So he stopped bringing it up.
That fell squarely into the “Too little, too late” category. By that point, the GOP monster, under Trump’s leadership, had vilified the entire medical system, and so there was no way the mob of Republican COIVD deniers were every going to take the vaccine at face value. Even with Trump’s alleged “genius” for manipulating his voters, there was no way to turn that around. So even here, Trump gets no credit - he deliberately steered the ship of state towards the rocks. His last minute failed attempt to veer away from running aground gets him nothing.
The concept of “intelligence” is very broad, covering a lot of attributes and with no agreement on which facets are more critical.
One facet he might have, I’d call it “savvy”… Like getting people to hold up “union workers for trump” signs, at a fake union rally. He knows the rubes will eat that shit up.
Overall though, I’m happy to say trump is a dunce for all the reasons given so far. I mean, to be self impressed with his results on what was essentially a dementia test, and then not to have the awareness that probably he shouldn’t brag about it… Sorry that’s pretty breathtakingly stupid.
I think this hits some important marks. And I agree, I think, that Trump didn’t really expect to win. But this runs up against the thought that I have that Russia played a part in his win and that Trump knew that.
So my brain locks and I can’t think about it anymore.
But how much of that is Trump, and how much is it the people Trump hired? Finding people to do the grunt work of organizing a campaign is pretty easy if you have money, and making up signs for the TV is pretty standard. I’d be more shocked if there weren’t signs like that at every rally, whether they were true or not.
Putin was playing “Heads I win, tails you lose”. Worst case scenario, they spend a lot of money promoting trump, and Trump loses. Even then, we all knew that Trump was going to claim the election was rigged, he effectively told us as much long before election day. Years of his self-funded Pity Me media empire whining about it, and telling everyone how he would have done a better job at everything compared to Clinton would still have caused a lot of damage to civil discourse in the US.
Winning just took that to a whole new level, but I expect Putin would have been happy either way.
It’s not a matter of vileness or of intellectual pretentiousness. We just find it difficult to believe Trump is intelligent when he shows no evidence of being intelligent - even in cases where being intelligent would have benefitted him.
Right—and I’m certainly not arguing that he’s more intelligent than your average bear. What I’m saying is that arguments that he’s LESS intelligent than average seem as much wishful thinking as they are evidence-based.
In other words, while I wouldn’t call him “intelligent,” I hesitate to call him stupid. Most of the stupid things he’s done seem to be a result of laziness (too lazy to read the full brief, easier to wing it than to prepare a speech) than lack of ability. But as wolfpup said, at this point, it’s probably six of one, half a dozen of the other—an ordinary person who can’t be bother to avoid stupidity might as well be a stupid person.
I always say that Trump is a lot like a shark. No shark is ever going to balance a checkbook, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. They’ve been the apex predator of the seas for 400 million years. (Parenthetically, sharks run from a fight at the first sign of pushback, because an injured apex predator is no longer at the apex).
One of his strengths that is (in my opinion) under-discussed is his ability to turn in a certain kind of insult-comic demagogue performance. If you see him on camera these last few days and focus on how incoherent he seems, even by Trump’s low standard of coherence, you’re missing what his performance is about.
By now his audience is well-versed in Trump’s litany of grievances, his dogwhistles, strawmen, punching-bags, applause lines. He doesn’t actually need to articulate them! The only thing he needs to nail is the cadence, the Sprechgesang of the insult-comic/inspirational speaker/demagogue. This is the wavelength his audience is tuning into. He doesn’t have to choose perfect words. He doesn’t even have to use any words. Like that Vegas insult comic, all he has to do is feed off the audience’s energy, to let his tone rise and fall to mirror their disdain, their mockery, their indignance, their ego-protecting superiority.
Add a bit of comedic timing, some experience in front of cameras, and a whole lot of practice, he’s now the biggest insult comic the country has ever seen. Truly a shark of that narrow genre. He’s not a smart man, but neither is it smart to call him stupid.
Well, no, sharks ARE stupid. They’re very good at what they do; it’s just that what they do doesn’t involve any intelligence. It involves strong jaws, and a keen scent for blood, and lots and lots and lots of teeth, and sharks are very good at all of those things.
To those saying that it’s just a willingness to lie or be otherwise evil, certainly that explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of people in the world who are as willing to be evil as Trump. But most of them haven’t had his successes. There’s definitely something that he’s good at, and we shouldn’t underestimate that.
